Johnny Depp's loves: from the "good, sweet and protective" man for his exes to the toxic relationship with Amber Heard
From the make-up artist Lori Depp, whom he married at the age of 20, to the mother of his children, the French actress and singer Vanessa Paradis, all of his exes before Amber Heard - from Jennifer Gray to Winona Ryder and Kate Moss- argue that the Pirates of the Caribbean actor is far from being a violent person, at least in their experience
Fate sometimes takes the strangest forms. For Johnny Depp he had the curves of the guitar that Robert Palmer, the second husband of his mother, Betty Sue, gave him when he was only 12 years old. That man who died in 2000, after spending half his life in prison in Statesville, near Chicago, and who was also the one who introduced him to alcohol, is still "an inspiration" for the actor.
This is how he told it six years ago, just a few months before the scandal of his toxic relationship and his conflictive divorce with Amber Heard broke out, when he dedicated the song As bad as I am to her at the Grammys, which he played with his band Hollywood Vampires: “My stepfather was an unusual guy and also a bit of a bum. And he had this toast: 'To you, as good as you are. For me, as bad as I am. You're still as good as you were and I'm still as bad as then, Robert."
With that first guitar, Johnny formed his first band in Florida and dropped out of high school at 16 because he wanted to be a rock star. The band was called The Kids and the rebellious and handsome viol player soon fell in love with the bassist's sister. It's an open secret that at that age the guitar is also an excuse to get girls.
Lori Anne Allison was five years older than him and watched him rehearse every day in her garage. Things between them got serious almost without their realizing it. They married in December 1983, when Depp was 20, to move to Los Angeles with the rest of the band. They were determined to make history in music and as a couple. She was – and still is – a makeup artist, but she wanted to be a manager, and she quickly found a place in the industry. In fact, she was the one who introduced him to Nicholas Cage, his first friend and drinking partner in Hollywood.
Cage was, in turn, the one who convinced Depp that he had to try his luck as an actor and got him an audition with Wes Craven for A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), the first of the films in the Freddy Krueger saga. . Thus, almost by accident, Johnny also became one of the first victims of the greatest horror icon of the eighties, and found a career that he had never dreamed of.
The life of a musician did not pay well, and instead the castings happened one after another. Along the way, his marriage to Lori Anne was failing. They divorced in 1985, but their friendship never ended. Not only is she still known as Lori Depp, but she has not hesitated to defend him: "He is talented as a musician and as an actor, and he can be a pirate like no one else in this industry, but above all things he is a person with a good heart." said the make-up artist a few years ago.
A year after their divorce, Depp met then-Twin Peaks star Sherilyn Fenn. When in '87 Fenn appeared in the series 21 Jumpstreet, the police with which the actor definitively rose to fame, the rumors of romance and even commitment were unstoppable.
They didn't confirm it at the time, but in 2017, after her Depp's name was installed in tabloid headlines over Heard's accusations, Fenn said in an interview with The Big Issue: "We dated for two and a half years. , when we both just started in the industry. He was my first love and he was very sweet. I was a girl and for the first time I found true love, someone who was going through the same thing as me, with a very strong connection – we cooked, we were together, we laughed and we cried. I know him as a human being, beyond the movie star he became, and I love him for it."
"We caught fire," Jennifer Gray told People a few weeks ago about her relationship with Depp. The protagonist of Dirty Dancing wrote in her memoir Out of the Corner, which has just been published, that the actor asked her to marry him two weeks after they started dating, in 1989. They were a symbiotic couple, one of those who even dress the same : “We even wore twin leather jackets!”
In her book she transcribes from her diary of the time: "I'm sure I'm in love for the first time in my life... He's good, kind, funny, intelligent, moral, empathetic and respectful." The relationship lasted nine months, according to Grey, because he "got more and more frustrated as he became more famous." She left him with a note in his hotel room, but it also left him with a sweet taste: she came from a terrible tragedy, a car accident in which her ex, Matthew Broderick, was driving, in which they were both injured and their two companions. they died, and his history with Depp was like a balm. "I felt repaid by God after all the shit I'd been through," she writes.
Just then Johnny met who he believed to be the love of his life, Winona Ryder. They were together for four years, until 1993, and were the most emblematic young couple of the early nineties. They met for the first time at the premiere of the movie Great Balls of Fire (1989), which starred Ryder, and for both of them it was love at first sight.
They moved in together a few months later and the romance was sealed on the big screen under the lens of Tim Burton in Scissorhands (1990). In the film, perhaps prophetic, that strange, dark, but deep down innocent and romantic boy, who ended up becoming the Californian director's favorite actor, is accused of a terrible crime he did not commit, and saved by Kim, the character of Winona.
In addition to formally committing himself outside of fiction, Depp had "Winona Forever" tattooed on his arm. In an interview at the time with Rolling Stone, Depp confessed: “There was nothing in my 27 years that compares to what I feel for Winona. It's like an atomic bond. You can believe that something is real, but it is totally different when you really feel it.
When they broke up he already had problems with alcohol and had just experienced the overdose death of one of his best friends, River Phoenix. He had no trouble erasing the last two letters of his ex-girlfriend's name so it read: "Wino Forever." Burton would later say, however, that working with him after his breakup felt like "Winona had taken her soul and her heart."
That they lived partying, always drunk, and also on drugs, or that they destroyed hotels in their fights – he ended up in jail after an argument at The Mark in New York and had to pay US$10,000 for the damages he attributed to “a hidden armadillo in the closet”; she was banned forever from the Hotel de Cap in Cannes, after one of their last encounters – it was part of what paparazzi and magazine editors loved about them: grunge, heroin chic, dangerously rebellious style and sick that had already cost Phoenix his life in the Viper Room in Hollywood.
When they met at Café Tabac in New York in January 1994, Moss was 19 and Depp was 30. She was already revered in London, but she was terribly lonely: "No one had been able to take care of me and, while he was with me, Johnny did. I found that I could believe him and what he told me. I could ask him 'What do I do?, and he would advise me. I knew from the first time we met that we were going to be together," Moss told Vanity Fair in 2017.
Last Thursday, in the defamation trial that Depp initiated against Heard in Virginia, the Aquaman actress justified that she hit her ex-husband in the face because her sister Whitney got in the way of an argument between them right on a staircase and that He recalled an alleged incident in which the actor would have pushed Moss down the stairs when they were dating in the 1990s, something he had previously stated in British court: “She was trying to make Johnny stop. Her back was to the ladder, and Johnny is swinging toward her…” Heard declared. I didn't hesitate for a second, I instantly thought of Kate Moss and the stairs."
She never accused him of such a thing, but she did not testify at the trial either and her statements in the media are rare, in general. However, the interview in which she agreed to talk about Depp with Vanity Fair was in 2017, when the scandal between the actor and Heard had already broken out. In that note she said that when they separated, because she wanted to have children and he was not ready, she missed him very much. “He had lost the person he trusted the most. It was a nightmare. Years and years of crying, oh, how many tears! ”, She said as if to establish a position in favor of her ex.
Johnny, for his part, always blamed himself for the breakup, and in a conversation with Hello magazine in 1998, he gave some indication of what today would be clearly understood as a toxic relationship: “I had never been so emotional with him before. a woman. I was stupid, because we had so much. I own what happened – I got hard to deal with, let work get in the way and didn't pay enough attention to it. I became someone horrible in coexistence, believe me, I can be a jerk sometimes.
But, as on all previous occasions, Depp quickly found solace in the arms of a new love. The actor met Vanesa Paradis while filming The Ninth Gate in Paris with Roman Polanski in 1998. He fell madly in love with the French actress and singer as soon as he saw her: “She was wearing a dress with a bare back, and I first saw that back and his neck, and then he turned around and I saw his eyes and boom!”
With her he did feel that he was ready to start a family: Lily-Rose was born on May 27, 1999; John Christopher "Jack" Depp III, on April 9, 2002. They were together fourteen years; The actor had met Heard while filming The Rum Diary in 2009 and the split became official in 2012.
A year later, he told Rolling Stone of her breakup: “It wasn't easy for her. It was not easy for me. It was not easy for the boys. It doesn't end the fact that you care about that person, that she is the mother of your children, that you will know her forever, and that she will always be in your life precisely because of those boys. And you have to try to make it come out in the best way.”
Paradis backs each of those words with his unconditional support since Heard's first accusations came to light, even when the father of her children left her for that woman: "We were friends for fourteen years and raised two beautiful children," he declared in 2020–. He is a generous, attentive, kind and not at all violent man. I know what Amber Heard is alleging, but it has nothing to do with the Johnny I know; he was never violent or abusive towards me.”
Like all her other exes, she holds Depp's testimony to the letter: "I never got to the point of hitting Amber in any way, nor have I ever hit any other woman in my life." And although, as Ryder says, he can only speak from his experience, his is, at least, an experience common to seven public women willing to defend him.
